Pooler to get 2 new voting precincts ahead of 2019 elections

Saturday

In the 2018 mid-term election, Chatham County saw a surge in voter registrations and early voting numbers.

The lines at some poll locations were short, with voters in and out in under half an hour or so.

But some lines were long. Very long.

At 10:30 p.m. on Election Day, voters at Rothwell Baptist Church in Pooler reported about 60 people were still in line waiting to vote. Others reported it took more than four hours to cast ballots.

Now, Chatham County’s Board of Elections is looking for locations to house two new precincts in Pooler, which they hope will be ready ahead of this year’s municipal elections.

It’s an issue that Elections Supervisor Russell Bridges attributes to Pooler’s growing pains. The city’s booming population growth in the last few decades.

In 2018, Pooler Mayor Mike Lamb told Savannah Morning News he estimates there were about 2,000 residents in Pooler when he moved there 42 years ago. In 2017, Census data estimates put the population at 24,000.

The new precincts will include at least two voting machines — Bridges said that’s the minimum number for any precinct countywide.

“By opening two more polls, there’ll be a net increase in the number of machines. It’s based on the number of voters,” Bridges said. There are never less than two touchscreens under today’s configuration in a poll. We don’t open with less than two.”

There are currently three precincts in Pooler.

Precinct 7-6 is the centermost, and covers the areas south of U.S. 80 and north of Pine Barren Road. In the areas east of Interstate 95, Interstate 16 is the southern boundary of the precinct. Voters who live within these boundaries vote at Pooler City Hall.

The areas north of U.S. 80 fall within precinct 7-7; voters cast ballots at Rothwell Baptist. The areas south of Pine Barren Road are in precinct 7-12; voters cast ballots at Pooler Church.

Precincts 7-7 and 7-12 are each have nearly twice as many voters as precinct 7-6.

Bridges said precincts 7-7 and 7-12 will likely be divided to make way for the new precincts.

But there are a number of factors the Elections Board must consider, the two most important being voter commonality and how active voters are distributed across the city. Bridges is aiming to keep people who vote on the same ballots together.

In precinct 7-7, there’s already a line drawn: most of the areas north of Pooler Parkway and Forest Lakes Drive and west of Interstate 95 fall within Chatham County Commission District 8, which means they vote on similar ballots for county elections.

Nearly all of the rest of Pooler falls within Chatham County Commission District 7, including the other precinct the board is looking to divide, precinct 7-12 — which makes finding a dividing line more difficult.

They can’t divide precinct 7-12 based on the municipal election districts either, since Pooler doesn’t have municipal districts — Pooler’s city council members don’t represent any specific area of Pooler. The top six vote-getters citywide become the aldermanic board.

But dividing the districts is just the first hurdle. They also have to find buildings that can serve as precincts.

“The biggest problem in places like Pooler is finding places to put the polls. Pooler is residential, and it has a huge commercial district, but the Tanger Outlet and the shopping mall and all those places — they’re not amenable to be polling places,” Bridges said. “We usually use community buildings, public places, churches and schools.”

They haven’t found any concrete options yet, but Bridges said staffers have been out to scout potential locations in Pooler around a dozen times already.

After they find two new precinct locations, they’ll take it to Pooler’s city council to make sure the new precincts are as growth-proof as possible.

“What good is the plan if they say, ‘We’ve got knowledge that there’ll be 10,000 new residences here in a year?’” Bridges said. “We’re going say, ‘Based on what we have today, based on what we see.’”

A change is gonna come

A presidential election, like the one coming in 2020, usually garners the highest voter turnout statewide.

Bridges said the 2016 gubernatorial election broke that trend.

4,114,732 Georgia voters cast their vote for president in 2016, and 3,939,328 voted in the Georgia gubernatorial election in 2018.

Bridges said they weren’t prepared for the higher than normal voter turnout in 2016.

“We’ve done a number of gubernatorial elections, and they’re just not hotbed elections,” Bridges said. “We’ve done enough of these over the years that our normal model of projection worked just fine. This time, it didn’t. We weren’t proud of what happened, but we did the very best we could do.”

By contrast, 2,550,216 Georgia voters cast their ballot in the governor’s race in 2014.

Pooler, like the rest of the state, will be getting new voting machines in 2020.

“We have to get this done because we can’t do this next year. We’ll be able to handle it next year; we’ll have a new voting system. What I know about the new voting system: it offers some opportunities the current voting system doesn’t,” Bridges said. “There’s a lot I don’t know about the new voting system.”

The new electronic ballot markers will still include touchscreen computers. But instead of tabulating the vote through the computers like the current devices, a paper ballot will be printed out after voters make their selections.

Voters can then review a summary of selections on their ballot printout before putting it through a scanner, where the votes are tallied.

The vendor of the new machines is not yet known, and setups from different vendors vary, but many offer ballot printouts that include text summaries as well as barcodes where voter selections are encoded for tabulation.

“All it’s going to do is mark a ballot and print it for you. You’ll get a paper copy. You look at this paper copy. You walk over to a scanning device and slip it in,” Bridges said. “It keeps the paper, because the paper becomes the official audit trail.”

The new machines, plus the added pressure of the 2020 presidential election, means Pooler's new precincts have to be operational by the November election this year, Bridges said.

“We, over May, June, July and August will put this together, because I want to have this in place about 60 days ahead of the election in November,” Bridges said.

For now, the Elections Board is still looking for potential sites for the new precincts, and they’re open to suggestions, Bridges said.

“If there are facilities in Pooler that are interested in being polling sites, they can contact us," Bridges said." It’s rare, but if somebody is aware of a great community center or a church that has a wonderful fellowship hall, that saves us from having to come out.”

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